And my 911, in particular, is kind of on the 'overbuilt' side for track days. Tyson and Dave at TRE made me a car that lets Viper and Corvette owners think I'm some kind of Michael freakin' Schumacher. The big-car guys keep adding horsepower, and somehow never manage to catch my little 964-motored widebody coupe. A typical day there will see me passing just about everyone in the red group, often with a passenger riding along and only street tires underneath.
Thank you, TRE Motorsports.
There are exceptions, of course. Drivers like John Dearing or Vipers like the Competition Coupe are usually quicker than I am. But for the drive-it-to-the-track class, my little 911 is pretty hard to improve on.
And even if you forget about the other drivers on the track, there's something about my car that just feels
right when it's at Willow Springs. Its gearing seems perfectly matched to the track. I just approach redline in turn 8 and at the end of the front straight. It's light enough to dance through turns 3, 4 and 5. I can reel in most of the heavier, high-horsepower cars on any section of the track other than the front straight. Sometimes I even manage it there.
Through turn 4 at Willow.
Driving on a track is just an entirely different experience than driving on public roads. Not only is the sense of acceleration and braking more dramatic, but on the track your wheels and tires spend a lot of their day sliding. In fact, I think maybe the central experience of driving on a track is getting in touch with a feeling that would induce panic if it happened on a public road. Your car is breaking away from you, constantly, maybe as often and as regularly as your heart is beating in your chest. You're making constant corrections, dancing along the ragged edge of adhesion.
And as much as you are aware of every instant of it, another part of your brain, maybe something down in the brain stem, is playing a much larger role than your conscious self is. A lot of it is automatic: it's muscle memory and sense-driven decisions -- how much to brake, how much to accelerate, just how you turn -- that you implant in your brain with repetition, and only partially understand and control in the conventional sense of thinking and doing. It feels instinctive -- more immediate than anything you can consciously think about or control.
At the same time, the whole event is a shared experience. All of us are going through the same thing out there on the track, and we can use our conscious thinking to reflect on it, talk about it, and help each other out. It ends up being an intensely solitary experience and a group experience all wrapped into the same day. I can't think of anything else that I do that's like it.
And having a crowd of other 911's there also puts me in touch with a bigger sense of what this particular car design is capable of. It's fun helping out novices with pretty-much-stock 911's, watching them learn how to hunt and overtake cars with twice their horsepower. It's also fun to see the full race cars that show up. They leave me in the dust, usually, but it's nice to see what a more-developed car and a skilled driver can do in a 911.
The
Tracquest/
Speed Gallery day is a little different than
Open Track Racing, in that a very high percentage of the cars are 911's, but almost none of them were made before 1994. And these cars aren't often stock. In the red group, I got to drive with multiple street GT3's, a GT2, a 997 Carrera S, and about a half dozen extensively modified twin turbos. It's pretty amazing to see what these cars are capable of. And if you want to see high-end Porsche capability combined with professional driving, there was a team practicing for next months race at Daytona with an both an '01 and an '04 GT3 Cup Cars. They said the '01 was running 1:25's and the '04 was running 1:23's. Most of the other cars in attendance were running in the 1:35 to 1:45 range, to put that in perspective.
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Tracquest/Speed Gallery at Willow.
The two different track-day groups bring in two different crowds, but one thing stays the same. For whatever reason, 911 owners who track their cars have the opposite personality traits of the old-fashioned public perception of 911 owners (you know, the porcupine joke, etc.). Great guys. In my opinion, they make better students, too -- maybe because the cars require more focus and skill to drive.
Pelicanites at OTR, lined up for the photo shoot.
But the group with
Open Track Racing is mostly from Pelican, and we know each other better. At the end of the day we get some pictures of the 911 pack all lined up and maybe go get a meal at the Outback Steakhouse in Palmdale.
During these winter months, it's dark again when I finally pull the car back into the driveway and through the gate, turning it off and listening to the last gurgles of the oil in the cooling lines and the muted clicks from the engine compartment as the exhaust begins to shed its heat.
Most normal days, I work until about 2 am. But on track days, this just isn't an option. I don't know what it is about driving that takes so much energy, but by the time I've gotten back home my mind might still be racing -- maybe looking to get the details of the day posted on Pelican -- but the muscles once again dictate what's really going to happen. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm out. I'll need eight or ten hours of sleep to recover from another day at Willow Springs.
Next up, a day with
All-Import Racing at Willow on February 9th.
Click here to sign up. I'll be teaching my class and wearing out some tire rubber.
Back on the road, with the ducktail.
And if you've got lots of time and a fast connection,
right-click on this link to see a whole bunch of passes from the
Tracquest/
Speed Gallery day. My video camera's power supply was on the fritz, though, so the footage is grainy. 58 megs, super self-indulgent, and Quicktime.